For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychic-visions thriller The Dead Zone (1983), a Stephen King adaptation directed by David Cronenberg.
Practically every single zombie movie made since 1970 has been influenced by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in some way. Every time a small group of survivors boards themselves up in a cramped locale only to be besieged & disemboweled by an invading zombie horde, Romero’s legacy hangs heavy in the putrid air. And so, I found myself thinking a lot about Romero’s Living Dead series this Halloween season as I saw its influence echoing throughout all the zombie titles I binged during the heaviest days of my horror-movie mania. What confounded me most about seeing Romero’s work infinitely reiterated and reinterpreted was that I was starting to forget why, exactly, the dead rose in the original Night of the Living Dead in the first place. The only explanation I can recall is that, “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” and that the phenomenon is otherwise treated as a natural disaster that can neither be understood nor prevented by the living. So, then, why were all the post-Romero zombie flicks I watched this October so intent on explaining the sources of their zombie outbreaks instead of just letting the walking dead speak (i.e., groan) for themselves? If anything, it felt as if they were all in an ever-escalating competition to come up with the most preposterous, absurdly over-specific reason for the dead rising instead of following Romero’s lead and leaving it deliberately ambiguous.
Romero’s zombie-attack victims philosophizing about Hell running out of room for deceased sinners at least gestures towards a religious reason for the phenomenon, even if it is pure speculation. Maybe that’s what inspired MVP Romero enthusiast Lucio Fulci to lean into religious blasphemy for the source of the zombie outbreak in his 1980 classic City of the Living Dead, a.k.a. Gates of Hell. City of the Living Dead was Fulci’s attempt to pay homage to H.P. Lovecraft, as indicated by its setting in the Lovecraft-invented town of Dunwitch but, as the inclusion of “The Living Dead” in its title suggests, it’s a pure Romero riff through & through. All of the zombie-horde invasion & disemboweling you’d expect to see in a later, proper Living Dead film is on full, shameless display, with Fulci going his usual extra mile to make sure everything is as disgusting as possible in a series of for-their-own-sake gags: ocular bleeding, victims puking their literal guts up, windy blasts of flying maggots, etc. And what is the reason for all of this hellish mayhem? A Catholic priest has hanged himself in a Dunwitch graveyard. We first see the priest’s suicide as a psychic vision during a distant seance, and once we travel to Dunwitch to investigate, the image repeats itself at the start of every gross-out zombie attack. Fulci presents that suicide as an act so blasphemous that it has opened the literal gates of Hell, so that any fucked up horror he can imagine is justified in being unleashed upon the audience. Meanwhile, Romero & Lovecraft both likely would’ve skipped the explanation part and left the source of that supernatural mayhem horrifically unknowable.
Scooter McCrae’s 1994 SOV horror Shatter Dead also uses religious blasphemy to explain the source of its zombie outbreak, but it at least tries to keep the inciting incident unfathomable to the human mind. The film opens with a meeting of the sacred and the profane: a sexual tryst between The Angel of Death and a human woman, staged under a ceiling fan light and a layer of warped-VHS grime. Months later, we watch a Romero-style heroine survive the daily banality of a post-zombie apocalypse, wherein religious cults run amok and the undead are homeless societal rejects. Like City of the Living Dead, most of its thematic blasphemy is suicide-based, establishing a world where everyone & everything conspire to pressure you into joining the zombie horde via suicide, so you can stay “young” forever. Shatter Dead has earned some cult-cinema notoriety as an obscene object by allowing that nihilistic sales pitch to follow its characters into the bedroom, including some incredibly graphic sexual imagery involving gun play. In the most memorable sequence, our suicide-avoidant protagonist has sex with her undead boyfriend and works around the lack of bloodflow to his penis by strapping a pistol to his belt and using its barrel as a marital aid. It’s a shocking image, and it’s one that recalls the Angel of Death sex scene at the start of the picture, where a gender-ambiguous angel appears to be wielding an unseen hard-on despite their external feminine appearance. The angel’s phallus is never revealed to the audience with the same pornographic detail as the strap-on handgun, but it is indicated to be a dangerous weapon in its own right, given that it incites a zombie apocalypse by getting a human woman pregnant.
If the reason behind a zombie outbreak isn’t religious, it’s usually scientific. Even Night of the Living Dead includes a throwaway line from a news reporter supposing that the dead may have risen because of a passing satellite. The 1974 Spanish whatsit The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (a.k.a. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) is much clearer in passing the blame for a zombie outbreak to newfangled scientific machinery. Set in the English countryside, its own zombie lore involves a new piece of experimental agriculture equipment that eliminates pests & parasites from farm crops via new forms of radiation. The danger of this experiment is only apparent to the hippie Londoner who happens to be passing through this farmland on vacation, given that his all-natural granola lifestyle means he’d rather see the parasites kept at bay via more traditional methods. He’s proven to be in the right when the radiation from this newfangled farm equipment starts to bring the dead back to life and they start to drag the living back to the graves with him. Only, no one believes him, and the small-minded townies suspect that he’s responsible for all the murders himself. The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is very clearly a post-Romero zombie movie, but its main villains are the cops who suspect the urbanite out-of-towners for the undead’s supernatural crimes. Every single time the heroes see a way out of a tight jam, the cops rush in to fuck it all up, all the way through the bummer ending. Then, the radioactive farm equipment gets switched back on again, no lessons learned. Brutal.
Not all dead-raising science is accidental, nor is it always exclusive from religion. In 1981’s Dead & Buried, a mad-scientist mortician (played by Jack “Grandpa Joe” Albertson of Chocolate Factory fame) has found a means of reconstructing the human body post-death in cosmetic procedures that go far beyond his usual duties as a corpse beautician. We watch in time-elapse as reconstructs the human form from the skeleton outward like Dr. Frankenstein building his monster. Only, he needs a little religion to help animate those corpses, so he turns to Voodoo to help get them back on their lumbering feet. It turns out this combination of religion & science makes for a relatively healthy mix, as far as zombie outbreaks go. The living dead in the small town of Potter’s Bluff, where this crazed mortician reigns supreme, are thoroughly re-integrated back into society post-death. They’re given jobs; they’re given a hobby (even if it’s always the same amateur photography hobby, documenting the mad scientist’s crimes); they’re made part of a real, functional community. All of that plot explanation likely constitutes major spoilers for the uninitiated, but I imagine if you’re reading this far into a blog post about vintage zombie movies you already have at least a vague idea of what Dead & Buried is about. If not, you might switch it off halfway through, impatient that there are no zombies in the movie at all, given that the first half plays like a story about small-town weirdos who violently murder outsiders for daring to treat their coastal home as a vacation getaway. Once those murdered interlopers start popping up around town as reanimated corpses, however, Potter’s Bluff turns out to be a very welcoming community to outsiders; they want you to stay forever.
Romero teases several explanations for the initial zombie outbreak in Night of the Living Dead without ever confirming one in particular. It seems that in the half-century since those teases, other filmmakers have gone mad attempting to find solid, specific reasoning for the dead to rise from their graves. We know that we like to see the dead walk around every October, but we’re not entirely sure there’s a good enough reason why they’d want to re-join the living to do so. It only fully makes sense if they’ve been ejected from Hell, the only place that’s presumably less miserable than this one. Everything else just plays as wild supposition and faint political commentary, when no excuse is truly needed to get those corpses walking.
The big-ticket repertory title this Halloween season was, undoubtedly, the theatrical re-release of Ken Russell’s 1971 classic The Devils, finally restored to its full blasphemous glory in 4k HD detail. What was supposed to be a one-week limited run for that holy-grail cult title gradually snowballed into a month-long celebration, lingering in theaters long past the expected end of its stay. I appreciated finally seeing The Devils projected on the big screen just as much as anyone and, if nothing else, that larger canvas inspired an even deeper respect for Derek Jarman’s work on its production design than I’ve ever felt before. The movie’s heavily marketed re-release was a largely corporate effort, though, as handled by the new Warner Bros sub-label Clockwork. And so, there were other, smaller cult-cinema restoration projects last month that The Devils inevitably overshadowed, since they didn’t have the same Major Studio muscle behind their marketing campaigns. They came and they went, largely unnoticed. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a couple of them here before they’re forgotten entirely.
The recent 4k restoration of 1989’s Begotten was just as much a labor of love as Mark Kermode’s decades-long campaign to fully restore The Devils. You just might not instantly recognize that effort by looking at the picture, since it presents such a deliberately ugly, degraded image. Much like The Devils, Begotten enjoys some cult-cinema notoriety as an extremely violent, highly offensive work of intricate visual craft. The difference is that, unlike Russell & Jarman, director E. Elias Merhige (later of Shadow of the Vampire notoriety) sought to apply that craft to exclusively hideous images, drowning his audience in blood, mud, shit, and cum until we collectively gurgle our last breath. Every image in Begotten is a “Wait, what am I looking at?” situation as the audience squints at its intentionally degraded black & white film stock, and the answer is always disgusting. It’s impressively relentless in that way, following one vaguely defined divine figure after the next as they’re disemboweled, defiled, and pummeled into the earth to an ambient noise soundtrack. Even when all of that death & destruction seemingly gives birth to new life in time-elapse plant growth, the cycle of life they’re participating in is too depressingly dingy to find the least bit beautiful. The only clue Merhige affords his audience that we’re being subjected to a cruelly cyclical creation myth is the end credits’ indication that its actors are playing characters like “God killing himself,” “Mother Earth,” and “Flesh on bone.” Otherwise, we’re just dragged through the muck of the world’s gloomiest experimental art film, now presented in even more harrowing detail.
It’s easy to imagine why Begotten might’ve fallen into distribution limbo, given that it starts with God’s suicide and only gets more gratuitously blasphemous from there. The prolonged effort to restore and re-release 1988’s Fright Night Part 2 is more surprising, given that it’s no more risqué nor uncommercial than the original, widely beloved Fright Night. This direct sequel picks up only a few months after the slaying of Chris Sarandon’s vampire hottie at the end of the first Fright Night, transforming reluctant hero Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) from sexually confused high school dweeb to sexually confused college dweeb. He’s successfully undergone intensive therapy that has erased the trauma of his initial run-in with the undead, but then he’s once again distracted by an invading vampire coven at the exact moment that he’s supposed to be losing his virginity to his girlfriend. So, instead of getting hot & heavy with his current sweetheart, he disappears into the night to hang around vampire-hunter horror host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), starting the whole cycle over again. The main difference is that the head vampire in this second outing is a bodacious babe (Julie Camden) instead of a handsome hunk (Sarandon). The suppressed queer themes of the original still carry over, though, since the new vampire coven is styled to resemble the kind of gender-ambiguous bisexuals you’d expect to see on every college campus, or at least in the background of every 80s Prince music video. Fright Night Part 2 drops the retro Hammer Horror homages from the first Fright Night, but it does bring back all of the 80s gross-out gore effects in its own go-for-broke climax, credibly living up to the original’s legacy. Most audiences wouldn’t know that, though, given that it’s been allowed to fall into distribution limbo due to corporate “regrouping”. It just fell through the cracks, like loose change abandoned in a movie studio’s couch.
Kino Lorber is handling the re-release of Begotten, while Synapse is working on getting Fright Night Part 2 back in circulation as well. I was lucky to catch both movies as a Halloween Weekend double feature at my local downtown shopping mall, where they were met with a much more muted reception than Clockwork’s re-release of The Devils in other parts of town. Maybe it says something about the constant spoil of riches that genre film nerds are currently being pampered with that two 80s cult objects that have been missing from official distribution channels for over 20 years have returned to such quiet fanfare. More likely, it’s just another indication that robust marketing goes a long way in finding niche moviegoing audiences, since The Devils was so successfully propped up as a must-see event by the Warner Bros promotional muscle. All you can really do as a fan is to help spread the word. Either dare your movie-nerd buddies to subject themselves to the grimy horrors of Begotten or suggest they lighten things up with another goofball episode of Fright Night that hasn’t been as thoroughly re-run into the ground as the first. It’s never been easier to access them, and they’ve never looked better, but most people wouldn’t know that without hearing word of mouth.
One of The Prytania’s Classic Movie selections this Halloween season was the 1958 Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee as the famous vampire. It’s a gorgeous picture in the exact way that most Hammer Horrors are, but it’s also one that doesn’t take a lot of risks in its transformation from page to screen, to the point where its US release had to be retitled The Horror of Dracula in order to distinguish it from the decades-old Bela Lugosi classic from Universal. If anything, Hammer’s Dracula film goes out of its way to streamline and normalize the Bram Stoker source material, consolidating characters and skipping over the novel’s strange fixations on real estate deals & oceanic travel. As a result, I greatly enjoyed looking at The Horror of Dracula but didn’t think much about it after leaving the theater, since it deliberately made itself more inconspicuous so as not to be dismissed as a silly novelty. I believe this was a mistake. By the 1950s, the first run of the Universal Monster movies had established a concrete canon of iconic horror villains in Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Gill-man (with no offense meant to my egomaniacal bestie the Invisible Man). Those famous creatures’ early outings in the Universal Monsterverse defined the look, feel, and tone of horror cinema (if not only by bringing some dark German Expressionist magic to Old Hollywood), so that any reiteration in subsequent decades would have to stand out as a silly novelty in order to stand out at all. Restaging Dracula in sumptuous 1950s Technicolor is not enough; you need a fun, memorable gimmick to zhuzh up the material. Even Universal knew that by the 1950s, when they regularly dispatched their Famous Monsters to terrorize Abbott & Costello in a series of slapstick comedies for children. And so, I left The Horror of Dracula craving the goofier, zanier side of Count Dracula in a novelty take on the character, and I’ve spent the rest of this Halloween season tracking down similar goof-offs from his Famous Monster brethren.
Of all the silly Dracula-adjacent novelties that called out to me this month, 1977’s Dracula’s Dog barked my name the loudest. In this far-afield deviation from the original novel, the Dracula surname has carried down through multiple generations all the way to Michael Dracula, a suburban dad who loves spending quality time with his middle-class family in sunny California. During an especially sun-dappled camping trip, Michael Dracula and the rest of the Dracula clan are attacked by a vampiric Doberman that once belonged to his ancestor, the Count Dracula of Dracula lore. The undead, ever-loyal Doberman attacks whomever has the misfortune of crossing his muzzle from scene to scene, but the real way he continues his former owner’s legacy is by biting and converting all nearby dogs into his canine vampire army, further ruining Michael Dracula’s family vacation on an escalating scale. You won’t be surprised to learn that Dracula’s Dog (aka Zoltan . . . Hound of Dracula) is not an especially well regarded addition to the Dracula canon, but I think that’s a shame. Anytime the hellhound Zoltan leapt out of his little doggie coffin to expose his bloody vampire fangs and gently nibble on his victims’ exposed necks, I experienced pure childlike delight, and that’s exactly what the Famous Monsters are good for. Sure, Zoltan and his loyal vampire-dog army trap Michael Dracula in a locked car and viciously attack him from all sides in a living-nightmare sequence straight out of Cujo, but any movie with the title Dracula’s Dog is going to feel like it was made for children, regardless of its content (a dissonance that director Albert Band would later push to further extremes with this son Charlie under the Full Moon home video brand). It’s not as controlled nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror take on Dracula, but it’s undeniably more memorable. You’ll never get the details of Dracula’s Dog mixed up with other Dracula adaptations in memory. For better or worse, it’s its own thing.
Maybe if the goofier, off-brand versions of Famous Monsters are going to primarily appeal to children, it’s best not to torment the little tykes with nightmare fuel like Dracula’s Dog; maybe the kiddos should just be pandered to. Universal realized this as early as their Abbott & Costello Meet The Monsters series in the 1940s & 50s, and they continued the tradition through the end of the millennium with another kiddie-friendly IP in 1999’s Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein. By then, the appeal of marketing directly to children was that their little brains are soft and malleable for advertisers, which is why this direct-to-video Frankencomedy doubles as a tourism ad for the Universal Studios theme park. You see, while Alvin and his band of chipmunk brothers are between rock gigs at Universal Studios, they discover that the real Dr. Frankenstein has also been employed by the park’s haunted house attraction and, of course, has released his lumbering undead creature into the wider park. Selling children on the timeless fun of the Chipmunks brand, the Famous Monsters brand, and the in-house amusement park brand, this disposable Halloween Season novelty is more a relic of shameless corporate synergy than it is a sincere addition to the Universal Frankenstein canon (even if its black & white opening positions it as a direct sequel in the James Whale lineage). By the time Alvin and the boys are performing a high-pitched Ozzy pastiche or rapping about fighting the monsters under their bed, however, the artistic merit of the project becomes a secondary concern. Much like Dracula’s Dog, it’s funny enough that it simply exists. Not for nothing, it also works as a great educational tool for young children who have not yet met everyone’s good friend Frankenstein and don’t know that he can be a big old sweetheart if you don’t treat him like a monster. Once loose, the creature quickly proves to just be a big, dumb kid, much like the suckers in the audience who begged their parents to buy this promotional video in the first place.
The next year’s follow-up, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet The Wolfman, was a bit of a letdown in comparison to the Frankenstein one, but that disappointment can be a useful educational tool for children too. It sets healthy expectations for what kids will find when they’re old enough to watch the actual Universal monster movies; the Wolf Man is kind of a drip. 1973’s The Werewolf of Washington is aware of this, making sure that its lycanthropic protagonist is recognizable as a dipshit putz long before he’s bitten by a werewolf. Dean Stockwell stars as a Washington D.C. political reporter who’s sent on assignment to Eastern Europe, where he annoys the local yokels until one of them gets fed up and bites him during a full moon (while disguised in werewolf form, of course). Back in Washington, he becomes increasingly fraught & paranoid as he transforms into a werewolf himself, in what gradually reveals itself to be a caricature of Richard Nixon’s then-deteriorating mental state. If it had been released a few years later, The Werewolf of Washington might be understood as a parody of the era’s political paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men. Instead, it’s just one of that genre’s goofier contemporaries, complete with very silly jokes about mixing up the words “pentagram” and “Pentagon,” among other groaner one-liners. And because Universal’s Wolf Man movie starring Lon Chaney Jr. established so much of the core iconography of the werewolf genre, it frequently pays homage to that specific iteration of werewolf lore, including fixation on the werewolf-smiting power of a silver-handled walking cane and its own low-budget recreation of Jack Pierce’s time-elapse makeup transformation effects. Like Dracula’s Dog, The Werewolf of Washington is both too preposterous to take fully seriously but also frequently too beautiful to dismiss as a throwaway novelty. Both movies are built on ridiculous premises, but they play them admirably straight for all they’re worth.
As much as the Wolf Man is a remarkably bad hang in the Universal Monsters crew, the Mummy is the biggest bummer of all. Most of the Mummy movies in that monster’s initial run are so punishingly boring that they’ve been forgotten to time entirely — their memories replaced with visions of Brendan Fraser & Rachel Weisz looking hot & sweaty in the big-budget desertscape of the late-90s reboot. The Mummy is the only Universal Monsters movie whose cultural memory has been surpassed by its derivatives’ and, as a result, most of the more prominent Mummy knockoffs are to be found in that late-90s era. Take for instance 1998’s ridiculously titled Bram Stoker’s The Mummy, a double-edged mockbuster of the then-upcoming Mummy remake and the long-cooled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “starring” the third-billed actors from some of the 90s’ blandest sitcoms (Caroline in the City‘s Eric Lutes, Home Improvement‘s Richard Karn; Tubi is a truly magical place). Better yet, take 1999’s even more ridiculously titled The All New Adventures of Laurel & Hardy in For Love or Mummy: an Ernestless outing from Jim Varney collaborator John Cherry, improbably cashing in on the era’s Mummy revival by resurrecting Laurel & Hardy from the dead to star in their own Abbott & Costello Meet the Monsters comedy. Now that’s what off-brand Famous Monster movies are all about. Never at any point in For Love or Mummy‘s runtime do you believe that it exists or that you’re spending your precious time on this Earth watching it. It’s also, admittedly, pretty funny. “Laurel” (Bronson Pinchot) & “Hardy” (Gailard Sartain) fit right into the Dumb & Dumber mold of the era’s comedic sensibilities, landing easy laughs as they prattle & pratfall their way through their run-in with a magically resurrected Egyptian mummy. The mummy itself has a pretty cool design to it too, even if it is a remarkably stupid one. The head from a sarcophagus is propped up on a traditionally-bandaged mummy body like a giant papier-mâché mask in an image that would feel more at home in a Saturday morning cartoon than in live action. It’s just the right kind of dumb.
The knockoff Gill-man movies of the 1960s are even dumber. During the era’s beach-party craze, the latecomer Universal Monster was resurrected for two cult-classic creature features in 1964’s The Horror of Party Beach & 1965’s The Beach Girls and the Monster. Together, they teach the ultimate lesson to studios like Hammer and, more recently, the failed grim-dark Universal Monsterverse reboots: have fun. It turns out that making movies is easy. All you need to do is pay some twentysomethings to dance in bikinis to surf rock and point the camera in the right direction. The only hard part, really, is convincing them to also let you pour chocolate syrup on them while getting pawed at by a man in a rubber suit; it sounds sketchy out of context. The monsters in these two beach-party monster movies are both instantly recognizable as direct descendants of the Gill-man. More specifically, the one in The Beach Girls and the Monster looks like a child’s crayon drawing of the Gill-man (complete with goofily round eyeballs) and the one in The Horror of Party Beach looks like a wax figure of the Gill-man that has melted in the beachside sun, but they’re both honorary Gill-men all the same. The Horror of Party Beach even goes the extra mile by including some underwater cinematography in wimpy homage to the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, demonstrating in time-elapse photography how fish DNA, human skeletons, and nuclear waste have mixed to create its not-quite-Gill-man creature. The resulting monster looks a little like if Big Bird’s cousin was a fish and his only known photo was taken at the height of a hotdog eating contest. Then, the goofy beach party fun goes sour during his routine monster attacks, wherein the chocolate-syrup blood looks shockingly brutal in black & white contrast. The Beach Girls and the Monster puts less effort into its own monster mayhem, but it hits just about every other entertainment metric you would want out of a so-called Bad Movie. Its performances are perfectly stilted, its knockoff Gill-man is perfectly doofy, and anytime they’re not sure what to do between kills everyone starts aggressively go-go dancing to surf rock & stock footage. Perfection.
None of these Famous Monster knockoffs are nearly as handsome nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, but they’re all much more memorably bizarre. Why make Dracula’s tactics & motivations more logical & methodical when you could also choose to mount him on a surfboard while bikini babes go-go dance on a nearby beach, cheering him on? The original run of Universal Monster movies are not only perfect pieces of pop art, but they’re also warm, unrepeatable introductions to cinephiles’ best friends. We’ve already met Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and Gill-man in their prime, and we’ll always primarily remember them as they were in that black & white heyday. So, my impulse with their later films is to watch my ghoulish friends have a little fun. Let them enjoy time with their family pets or get into buffoonish mishaps with the biggest dum-dums within striking distance. There’s no need to take any of this kiddie stuff at all seriously. Now, please remember to excuse my hypocrisy when I fall in love with Robert Eggers’s super-serious “werwulf” picture next month, negating everything I just said.
Welcome to Episode #276 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror titles from India & Indonesia, starting with the unsanctioned Child’s Play remake Papi Gudia (1996).
00:00 Welcome 02:13 Soulm8te (2026) 05:40 Savage House (2026) 09:08 Killer Condom (1996) 17:00 The Appointment (1982) 22:30 The Devils (1971) 25:15 Dracula (1958) 26:55 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
31:55 Papi Gudia (1996) 1:04:04 The Ornate Lock (Manichitrathazhu, 1993)
1:17:40 The Queen of Black Magic (1981) 1:28:35 Santet (1988)
Dear reader, you can be forgiven for mistaking Swampflix for an Alfred Hitchcock blog lately. At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. That final project is now complete, and I’ve successfully ranked all forty of Hitchcock’s thrillers below.
Even if one only limits their viewing of his films to his forty thrillers, that’s still a daunting number for the average person. Were they all worthwhile? Were there any that were overlooked classics forgotten to time because they didn’t have the name brand recognition of a Psycho or a Vertigo? Were there any that people shouldn’t even bother with? I made it my mission in 2026 to finish watching and, in the case of movies I hadn’t seen in over two years, re-watching all forty in order to generate a definitive (subjective) ranking. At last, the great work is complete.
The Bad
40. Frenzy (1972) – The bottom of the barrel. Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty, although it certainly is all of those things, but because of the pall that it casts over the rest of the director’s career. The subtleties, nuance, and clever handling of studio and censorship boards is gone; with nothing to restrain him, this is Hitchcock unbridled, and the film is craven, base, and vile in a way that makes one wonder if he would have always been this way if he had free reign from the beginning. If he had, we wouldn’t still be talking about his work, and this film’s very existence undermines the entire oeuvre.
39. Under Capricorn (1949) – An overlong period piece costume melodrama shot, like Rope, in a series of long takes, which causes the pacing to suffer mightily. Possibly the worst performance in Ingrid Bergman’s storied career. Shot in Technicolor, which is a waste, given that the Australia of the 1830s is a dull, brown place. Attempts to touch the hem of Rebecca’s garment and misses utterly. Not really a thriller at all, despite a last minute borrowing from Gaslight.
38. The Trouble With Harry (1955) – An unfunny comedy about eccentric New Englanders burying and unburying (multiple times) a corpse that all feel responsible for. John Forsythe’s Sam Marlowe is the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon, and not a single person feels like a real human being. A stagey movie that benefits from being gorgeous, as it effectively captures the beauty of autumn in Vermont, but has no other noteworthy qualities. Some mystery, no thrills.
37. Secret Agent (1936) – The worst of Hitchcock’s 1930s spy thrillers, and the only one that is a period piece, being set during WWI. A novelist/army reservist’s death is faked in order to send him behind enemy lines as a spy, where he is assisted by “The General,” who is played by Peter Lorre in brownface; you feel ashamed watching it play out on screen. Features a train bombing sequence that might look good if this were ever restored, but its problematic elements move this one to the back of the line for consideration for that honor, which is for the best.
The Boring
36. Number Seventeen (1932) – Only sixty-three minutes long but feels like it goes on for hours. A group of people all find themselves at the titular address, a ramshackle house that happens to sit above a rail line, where some number of the parties present intend to board a train later in the evening with a stolen diamond necklace. Attempts at farce are made, but they fall flat, and the men all look too much alike to untangle any of it. The last fifteen minutes, however, are extraordinary, as the final action sequence in isolation is a master class in tension, suspense, and miniature work.
35. Suspicion (1941) – Cary Grant is a useless lump of a man who latches onto the hem of a future wealthy heiress who is approaching old maid status (Joan Fontaine). Following their wedding, she (repeatedly) runs into townies and tells them about her new husband’s latest ventures, only to get an “Oh, honey,” followed by the revelation that he’s actually at the betting track or pawning her family heirlooms. Notable for featuring a character who is essentially Agatha Christie and for executive meddling that “softened” the ending from the source novel, but it doesn’t really matter. Skippable.
34. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) – Hitchcock remakes his own 1934 film, shifting the central focus from Peter Lorre’s fascinating villain in the original to Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day’s boring “heroes.” The film spends its first half hour meandering around Morocco before the plot finally starts, not that the pace improves once it does. You will hear “Que Sera Sera” over and over again, and be increasingly bored every time.
33. I Confess! (1953) – Montgomery Clift is a priest who takes the confession of a gardener who slew a local lawyer. When suspicion falls on Clift’s character because the victim was blackmailing him regarding an (unconsummated) pre-seminary affair, he is unable to break the confidentiality of the confessional and thus must seek other means to prove his innocence. Clift is stiff and wooden, and there’s very little of note visually here, but, like Number Seventeen, it picks up speed at the end when the true killer goes on the lam and the priest must assist in his pursuit. Not enough to save it, however.
32. Topaz (1969) –North by Northwest is often credited with introducing and popularizing many of the tropes that would appear in the early James Bond films. A decade later, with several Bond films having hit the market, Topaz is a spy thriller that answers the question of what a Hitchcock Bond film would look like while raising the further question, “Boy, Hitch sure was tired at this point, wasn’t he?” Not a bad movie per se, but meandering and lifeless. The only readily available version is 143 minutes long; perhaps the 127 minute theatrical cut trimmed some of the fat, but whether that would improve Topaz or not is an open question.
The Noteworthy
31. Murder! (1930) – The director’s first fully “talkie” picture, Murder! is an experimental work, not as we commonly think of the term, but in the sense that we get to go along for the journey as Hitch devises ways to incorporate the new technology into the film. Features first appearances of some of the master’s recurring narrative conceits: instead of a wrongfully accused and pursued man, this picture is about a woman who is sentenced for a murder that she didn’t commit, and follows a juror who experiences a change of heart and seeks to find the real killer before her execution, officially kicking off Hitchcock’s investment in stories of miscarried justice.
30. Blackmail (1929) – Sound technology was invented during the production of this one, resulting in two different versions: one talkie, one silent. While considering two-timing her boring Scotland Yard boyfriend, a young flapper defends herself against a would-be sexual assailant with deadly force. Her flight from the scene is witnessed by a man who tries to extort her for money. Expressionistic and exciting even when it’s not always engaging, this is the first time we see Hitchcock set his climax in/near a monument.
29. Jamaica Inn (1939) – Hitchcock’s last British film before he moved to Hollywood. Charles Laughton plays a dastardly local official whose scheming with a band of murderous thieves that operate out of the titular location is undermined by the arrival of Maureen O’Hara and the interference of an undercover naval officer. Often dismissed as a lesser Hitchcock, the sumptuous visuals (in the 4K restoration, at least), Laughton’s hamminess, and a sufficiently compelling romance narrative make up for a sluggish middle section.
28. To Catch a Thief (1955) – Cary Grant is a retired cat burglar whose old crew still resents him for escaping prosecution. When a series of thefts that copy his style break out along the French coast, Grant has to prove his innocence; to that end, he solicits information from an insurance investigator (John Williams—the actor, not the composer) that leads him to potential future theft victims Grace Kelly and her nouveau riche mother. Intrigue takes backstage to the Grant/Kelly romance, although this one is not without some fun visuals, like Grant scaling a house in the middle of the night or a beautiful scene set in an outdoor floral shop.
The Good
27.Torn Curtain (1966) – Sees Hitchcock getting surprisingly political with his thrillers again after the politically vague Stewart version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest. Paul Newman is a handsome scientist whose assistant/fiancee (Julie Andrews) follows him to East Berlin without realizing he plans to defect. It’s a ruse, of course, but her presence threatens to derail the whole mission to obtain the nuclear MacGuffin and makes their hasty retreat from the police state of the Soviet Bloc even more complicated. Perhaps a little overlong, and Newman and Andrews have very little chemistry despite being two of the hottest stars of the day, but fun nevertheless.
26. Family Plot (1976) – Hitchcock’s final film is a fun, solid watch, but it’s also not spectacular, and overly reliant on coincidence. Two small-time con artists, a phony psychic and her cabbie boyfriend, are chasing a $10K payday from wealthy Ms. Rainbird, who wants them to find the only remaining family scion, a bastard nephew she forced her sister to give up for adoption decades earlier. Meanwhile, a dastardly jeweler and his lover/accomplice engage in a series of high-profile kidnappings for ransom. The two narratives dovetail together in a perhaps obvious way, but it’s still fun to watch it come together. The only film on which Hitchcock collaborated with John Williams (the composter, not the actor).
25. Stage Fright (1950) – One of Hitch’s Hollywood era thrillers, but shot in and around London. An acting student (Jane Wyman) at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts is informed by her crush that he has just fled the home of an actress (Marlene Deitrich) with whom he has been having an affair, having discovered her in the middle of killing her husband with the intent to frame him; he begs Wyman to help him prove his innocence. Breaks a major narrative convention (and recurring Hitchcock trope) that riled contemporary audiences, but this allows the director to play around with his audience’s expectations, and features a fun musical performance of a Cole Porter song by Deitrich.
24. Spellbound (1945) – Ingrid Bergman is an extremely competent doctor in the male-dominated field of psychiatry. Her apparent frigidness thaws when her institution’s new director (Gregory Peck) arrives, but he may not be the man he seems to be. Features a dream sequence that was conceived by Salvador Dali; the romance is contrived, but Peck and Bergman sell it.
23. Dial M for Murder (1954) – A small scale domestic thriller shot on the cheap (among other corner cutting measures, a character’s trial and sentencing play out in less than a minute in a colorful void, completely removing the need for a courtroom set) as one of the trial runs for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Grace Kelly does some of her finest work against a cold, stony Ray Milland. John Williams (the actor again, not the composer) is very fun as a proto-Columbo trying to figure out how the villainous Milland manipulated the events.
22. The Paradine Case (1947) – Like Jamaica Inn, a frequently derided “lesser effort” that is more praiseworthy than its reputation would imply. In Peck’s second collaboration with Hitchcock, he plays a barrister who is called upon to defend a woman against the accusation that she killed her blind, war hero husband. He falls for the woman while preparing for her defense, threatening the foundations of his heretofore happy marriage. Great performances, especially from Ann Todd as Peck’s emotionally ravaged wife.
21. The Wrong Man (1957) – A docudrama based on the real arrest of a man named Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), a musician and family man who is falsely identified as an armed robber, tearing his life apart and destroying his wife (Vera Miles)’s mental health. The narrative is somewhat undermined by Hitch’s choice to cast the WASPy Fonda as an Italian-American, which blunts the film’s ability to effectively convey the role that prejudice plays in the arrest, but it nonetheless demonstrates the ease with which any of us might fall into and be destroyed by a broken system through no fault of our own. More timely now than then, and extremely compelling.
20. Young and Innocent (1937) – A successful actress is murdered by her husband, but the crime is pinned on a different man who happens to be her acquaintance and is coincidentally nearby. He escapes from his arraignment and enlists the help of the beautiful young daughter of the head of the local constabulary in trying to prove his innocence. Excellent miniature work, gorgeous tracking shots, and an exciting cave-in all make this one a lot of fun, but it is unfortunately marred by the presence of blackface in the finale.
19. Vertigo (1958) – Undoubtedly my hottest take about “the greatest film of all time” according to Sight & Sound (2012-2022) is that it’s “merely” good, not spectacular. Taken purely on visual terms, it would certainly be in contention, but it’s so lacking in human feeling (excepting a star turn by Barbara Bel Geddes’s as the bespectacled bombshell that Jimmy Stewart should be interested in) other than abundance of neuroses that it’s difficult to connect to on an emotional level. Perhaps it’s intentional that characters throw around the word “love” with abandon when I don’t believe a single one of them, just as Kim Novak’s monotone is purposeful, but it ultimately amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
18. Marnie (1964) – Much maligned due to an unnecessary scene of implied offscreen sexual assault (“implied” in the sense that you know it happened, but could plausibly convince yourself otherwise… maybe), this exploration of the dark side of sexual psychology features a truly winning performance from Tippi Hedren in the title role. The triggers for Marnie’s various episodes of mania are well executed visually, and the scene in which Marnie must mercy kill her beloved horse is genuinely heartbreaking. If you can overlook its flaws (and it’s admittedly a big “if”), there’s something truly beautiful here.
17. Saboteur (1942) – Essentially an American remake of The 39 Steps, although more jingoistic and with a more personal stake on the part of the hero. A wartime aircraft factory worker is accused of sabotage at the plant and must—you guessed it—go on the run to prove his innocence. Along the way, he meets/kidnaps a lady hostage who believes he’s guilty, interacts with various stand-ins for the everyday American, and ultimately finds himself fighting an enemy agent atop the Statue of Liberty. Great stuff.
The Great
16. Notorious (1946) – Roger Ebert’s favorite of Hitchcock’s films. After learning that her father was an Axis spy, patriotic American Ingrid Bergman is recruited by U.S. intelligence officer Cary Grant to infiltrate the home of a Nazi higher-up (Claude Rains) who successfully fled to South America. Her mission is complicated by her growing (mutual) love for her handler as well as the strictures of constant surveillance imposed by her husband’s watchful mother, one of the great Hitchcock villains.
15. Lifeboat (1944) – The survivors of the shelling of a freighter by a German U-boat fight not just for the survival of their bodies but of their souls when they discover a crewman from the enemy vessel is among their number. Tallulah Bankhead is stunning as the reporter whose icy dispassion slowly dissipates in a film that asks what good it is to survive if we become like our enemies, alienated from the things that make us human.
14. Rebecca (1940) – Considered to be one of Hitchcock’s best, and his only film to win Best Picture (star Joan Fontaine did not win Best Actress for her role here but did the following year in Suspicion). Make no mistake—it’s a great movie, but it suffers from an overlong, comedic opening in which our unnamed lead is romanced by widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) in Morocco before he returns with her to his home, the palatial estate Manderly, and the psychological elements of the plot come into play. A twisted fairy tale that’s worth the effort of making it through the messy first act, and features one of Hitch’s best villains in the form of Mrs. Danvers.
13. Rope (1948) – Hitchcock’s first attempt at shooting an entire film in long shots, much more successfully than in Under Capricorn. Two young men, groomed by their former schoolmaster (Jimmy Stewart) into thinking that they are better than everyone else and thus “above” good and evil, murder their former classmate for the thrill of it then host a dinner party in the same room as the corpse. Stewart struggles with his character’s moral complexities, but the film is nonetheless a triumph.
12. The Birds (1963) – The first hour breezes by with only minimal references to something odd happening with our feathered friends as Tippi Hedren traipses through romcom stations of the cross: the meet cute, the minor injury that her love interest can bandage, friction with an overbearing mother and then bam! A man with his eyes pecked out. The last hour is carnage and chaos. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.
11. Foreign Correspondent (1940) – An American goes undercover in Europe posing as a journalist, where he gets caught up in an assassination plot. Features some truly blockbuster moments of spectacular action, including a plane crash caused by a shot from a German ship, alongside breathlessly beautiful tableaux featuring hundreds of umbrellas moving like ballet dancers on a crowded street or ominous windmills turning slowly on a desolate plain. A marvel.
The Excellent
10. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) – While the later remake of this one focused on the parents of the kidnapped child and their attempts to find their offspring, this earlier version focuses more on Peter Lorre’s kidnapper, who is cultured, refined, and extremely dangerous; he’s a top tier Hitchcock villain comparable to Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca and Madame Konstantin in Notorious. Like Jamaica Inn, this is also an earlier Hitchcock where the lady lead gets to be an utter badass; she’s introduced in the film’s opening as a competitive sharpshooter, which comes in handy later. Leagues more interesting than the fifties revisitation of the same narrative.
9. The 39 Steps (1935) – The first “prelude to WWII” international intrigue thriller. A Canadian man (Robert Donat) helps a woman escape from a theater in which a gun goes off, only for her to reveal that she is a spy with information that must be secreted to her superiors. When she is murdered (with him as the prime suspect), he must flee across the Scottish Highlands in order to find her contact, only to meet obstructive bureaucrats and secret villains at every turn, all while handcuffed to a woman who doesn’t believe in his innocence. In many ways the prototype for all the “wrong man pursued” pictures that followed, and a solid win from the very foundation.
8. Strangers on a Train (1951) – A tennis star trapped in a loveless marriage to an unfaithful wife has fallen in love with a senator’s daughter. A fellow passenger on a train recognizes him, and knows a bit too much about the athlete’s situation from the society papers. The other man relates his own life troubles and how his father is standing in the way of his happiness, then jokes about how each could “take care” of the other’s problem, and no one would be able to figure out the motive. The tennis player laughs this off, but when his estranged wife is killed, he realizes that the other man was dead serious, and expects him to fulfill his half of their “bargain.” One of the master’s best domestic thrillers.
7. The Lodger (1927) – A working class family takes on a new tenant in their upstairs room at roughly the same time that a Jack the Ripper-style slasher called “The Avenger” is terrorizing London. The family’s chorus girl daughter matches the profile of the Avenger’s victims, and the young police officer who is fixated upon her latches onto the new lodger as the likeliest suspect. Is he correct, or is his singular fixation on an innocent man whose presence is a romantic inconvenience allowing the real killer to continue his dastardly work? A silent masterpiece that cribs from German expressionist film, Hitch’s first thriller is also one of his best.
6. The Lady Vanishes (1938) – The best of Alfie’s “prelude to WWII” international espionage thrillers. A young playgirl befriends an older woman when their return to England is delayed by an avalanche. They board a train together and the younger woman takes a nap, only to learn upon waking that her companion has disappeared, and various others aboard the train claim that no such woman ever existed. A variation on the locked room mystery, this one is full of unexpected twists, turns, and romance.
The crèmede la crème
5. North by Northwest (1959) – Alongside Vertigo and Psycho, the most common contender for the appellation of Hitchcock’s best film as well as the most frequently homaged/parodied. Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive whose ill-timed attempt to flag down a page at a hotel bar results in him being mistaken for George Kaplan, a spy who doesn’t actually exist. His flight from his pursuers and to clear his name is assisted and complicated by his romantic and erotic entanglement with Eva Marie Saint, ultimately leading to a showdown with the villains on Six Grandfathers Mountain (aka Mount Rushmore).
4. Sabotage (1936) – Perhaps the most undersung film in the director’s entire repertoire. An American woman (Sylvia Sydney) entrusted with the care of her younger brother lives in London, where her Eastern European husband operates a struggling movie theater. An employee at a neighboring business is an undercover detective trying to find evidence that the theater operator is one of a cabal of saboteurs seeking to undermine the social order. Contains one of the most shocking spectacles in the entire Hitchcock canon, and the most sobering depictions of the grief that follows. Often overlooked, but not to be missed.
3. Rear Window (1954) – The first Hitchcock I ever saw, and in many ways the perfection of his form. Jimmy Stewart doesn’t work as the protagonist of the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and struggles with the complexity of his character in Rope, but was born to play the believably cranky, thrill-chasing photographer L.B. Jeffries while Grace Kelly lounges around like an earthbound angel trying to convince him that she’s more than suited for a life of adventure. Raymond Burr is terrifying, and Thelma Ritter is adorable. The limitations of setting and character require an economy of storytelling that is sheer perfection.
2. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – Hitchcock’s personal favorite of his own films, and an excellent choice for that distinction. Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright) is a normal teenage girl living in quiet Santa Rosa, California, longing for something exciting to happen to her. She gets what she wished for in the most unpleasant manner possible, when the long absent uncle for whom she was named (Joseph Cotten) suddenly appears for a visit to the Newton clan. Initially delighted, young Charlie’s dream turns into a nightmare as the macabre reasons for Uncle Charlie’s spontaneous visit come to light, and young Charlie must protect her family, both from Uncle Charlie and the horrible truth. The romance plot in this one doesn’t really work, but the film is otherwise unimpeachable.
1. Psycho (1960) – What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it was the first slasher? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? That knowing the twists makes the film no less effective, no matter how many times you see it? When putting together my Hitchcock quickies list, I tried to come up with something new to say about it and found myself stumped. This is a film that anyone with even the smallest passing interest in film generally or Hitchcock specifically has seen. It had been discussed to death (and back) before I was even born. It’s Psycho.
For ten seasons, across both NBC and CBS, Alfred Hitchcock hosted 361 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with the final three seasons billed as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as the show’s time slot was extended. This was an anthology series that, in the director’s own words in the introduction to the sixth season premiere, told “homey little stories of an unusual nature,” often about “crime as practiced by ordinary people, like the people next door.” For the most part, I would describe each episode as a two-act play with a twist (two twists if you’re lucky), with about three cast members and two sets, not counting the opening and closing segments with Hitchcock himself. Over the course of my many years on this earth, I’ve probably seen most of the half hour episodes; Hour was not as widely syndicated, although I have seen it pop up from time to time on MeTV late at night, since that channel usually programs an hour long block of Presents anyway. As you can imagine, there are only so many stories that can be told in this format, and many of them start to run together—I can’t tell you how many of them revolve around a nephew with debts learning he’s set to inherit some money and coming up with a murderous scheme—but there are still a lot of original ideas and concepts. Hitchcock’s onscreen involvement in every episode, as he introduces and closes out each one, led many to believe that he was very involved behind the scenes, but this wasn’t really the case. Over the decade it was on air, Hitchcock directed a total of eighteen episodes, and like the show as a whole, they run the gamut from awful to excellent. I rewatched them all to see which ones would be worth recommending to fans of his work in the lead-up to my ranking of his features, and for each, I’ve also recommended a film from his catalog that best pairs with the episode, for thematic, casting, or narrative reasons.
“Revenge” – 3.5 stars
Season One, Episode One, aired October 2, 1955
Synopsis: The premiere episode. Ralph Meeker (who would later appear in The Night Stalker alongside Psycho alum Simon Oakland) plays a man who comes home one day to discover that his provocative new wife, played by Vera Miles, has been sexually assaulted. The police offer little help or reassurance, so the couple leaves the area. Husband slays the man his wife points out as her attacker, only for her to point to another man and make the same claim, clearly traumatized to the point that she sees her assailant in every man.
Pairing: The Vera Miles connection might lend itself to pairing this with Psycho, but there’s a later episode that’s better suited; as such, the “Vera Miles has a breakdown” element is best reflected in The Wrong Man.
“Breakdown” – 4 stars
Season One, Episode Seven, aired November 13, 1955
Synopsis: Joseph Cotten (who had previously collaborated with Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt and Under Capricorn) portrays a callous business executive who finds himself paralyzed but completely conscious following a car accident. Originally unmoved and even disgusted by an employee’s tearful reaction to being laid off, the man is only able to alert the morgue attendant that he is alive by shedding a tear, after several unfortunate things happen to his presumed-dead body.
Pairing: I’d joke that this one would pair well with Under Capricorn, as Cotten is only slightly less wooden here as an apparent corpse than he is in that stinker, but I cannot recommend that film in good conscience, or even in jest. Instead, I’ll provide a “Further Reading” instead and direct you to the audio version of Stephen King’s short story “Autopsy Room Four,” which references this episode and is very well narrated by Oliver Platt.
“The Case of Mr. Pelham” – 1 star
Season One, Episode Ten, aired December 4, 1955
Synopsis: Feels more like a (boring) Twilight Zone than an episode of AHP, as this is more of an existential story of terror with a seemingly supernatural twist. Tom Ewell (the titular Mr. Pelham) finds that everywhere he goes, people tell him that he just left, and that he was a good hang. Pelham eventually starts wearing an outlandish tie to differentiate him from his doppelganger, only for no one to believe him because he would never wear such a thing. Can you hear the sad trombone noise?
Pairing:Vertigo, given the overall theme of double identity.
“Back for Christmas” – 3 stars
Season One, Episode Twenty-Three, aired March 4, 1956
Synopsis: British Herbert Carpenter (John Williams) and his overly fussy wife Hermione (Isobel Elsom) promise their friends they’ll be back from America for the holidays, but then Herbert kills her and buries her in the basement he has been excavating under the guise of digging himself a wine cellar. Stateside, he establishes a cover story about the two separating and prepares to settle into a new life, until he receives a letter indicating that his wife has hired someone to finish the wine cellar as a Christmas gift while he’s away; the discovery of her body now inevitable.
Pairing: With Dial M for Murder, where Williams plays the magnetic detective rather than the killer.
“Wet Saturday” – 3.5 stars
Season Two, Episode One, aired September 30, 1956
Synopsis: Mr. Princey (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) is a well-to-do patriarch whose daughter has just slain the local schoolmaster in a fit of rage because he’s marrying someone else. Luckily, John Williams stumbles into the house at just the right time to be framed for it, comically.
Pairing: With Rope, where Hardwicke gets a strong turn as the father of the victim rather than the perpetrator.
“Mr. Blanchard’s Secret” – 1.5 stars
Season Two, Episode Thirteen, aired December 23, 1956
Synopsis: Amateur mystery writer Babs Fenton (Mary Scott) annoys the hell out of her long-suffering husband when she concludes that their neighbor has murdered his wife. Her insistence on creating bizarre fictions about the neighbors continues even after she meets the (living) Mrs. Blanchard. One of the more frustrating episodes: the comedy isn’t funny, and the mystery, such as it is, has no real resolution.
Pairing: The episode is clearly a parodic homage to Rear Window, which this would pair well with, but I would recommend avoiding this entry altogether. Mary Scott appeared in three other episodes of the series, all of which are top tier: “Crackpot,” directed by TV stalwart John Meredyth Lucas and featuring a genuinely frightening performance from Robert Emhardt; “Safety for the Witness,” directed by Norman Lloyd and starring Art Carney; and “The Diplomatic Corpse,” directed by Paul Henreid (Dead Ringer) and starring Peter Lorre. Any one of them is a better time than “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret.”
“One More Mile to Go” – 5 stars
Season Two, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 7, 1957
Synopsis: David Wayne (who starred in the 1951 Americanization of Fritz Lang’s M and portrayed the Mad Hatter on the Adam West Batman series) who impulsively kills his wife; his attempts to get rid of the body are hampered by a broken tail light and an overly helpful motorcycle cop. Possibly the best episode of the series, the first half is entirely without dialogue and relies solely on the image for suspense. The clearest demonstration of Hitchcock using the series as a proving ground for things he would include in later films, as the movie presages Psycho in many ways.
Season Three, Episode Three, aired October 20, 1957
Synopsis: Stars Vincent Price as an expert homicide detective who keeps a memento from each of his great cases on display, reserving the center spot for “the perfect crime.” He receives a visit from a defense attorney (James Gregory) who claims he can prove that Price sent an innocent man to the electric chair. It’s fine if you want to see a fun Price performance in an otherwise boring package, but you don’t need this episode for that; we have it in abundance elsewhere.
Pairing:Rebecca, although not for any thematic reasons. Price kills the attorney and uses his remains to create a ceramic vase, with Hitch’s closing narration performing its standard censor-addressing concerns by saying that the crime was discovered when a charwoman knocked the piece over, and cites this as the reason why cleaning women are always breaking vases. That a piece of the late Mrs. de Winter’s ceramic decor was broken (and a housekeeper blamed) is a plot element in Rebecca. I admit this is a stretch, but my other nomination was Marnie based solely on the fact that James Gregory appeared in the original series Star Trek episode “Dagger of the Mind” and that Marnie actress Mariette Hartley was in “All Our Yesterdays,” which is even more belabored.
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – 5 stars
Season Three, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 13, 1958
Synopsis: Pregnant Mary Maloney (Barbara Bel Geddes) is in a state of shock when her policeman husband comes home and tells her he intends to leave her. She knocks him out with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooks it; when the police come to investigate, they eat the murder weapon. This is perhaps the most well known episode of the show; when the series came to TV Land when I was a young teenager, there was a weekend long marathon that began not with the premiere, but with “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The narrative is also well known because the short story, written by Raold Dahl, is frequently anthologized. An absolute master work from start to finish.
Pairing: Bel Geddes’s only Hitchcock film was Vertigo and that’s already taken, as is Rope, the other big “evidence in plain sight” narrative from the director. Given the dearth of Hitchcock/Bel Geddes feature content, I’d instead recommend that you just do a marathon of all four AHP episodes she appeared in, although I would place them in a different order than release date (and only this one was directed by Hitchcock). Start with the Arthur Hiller-directed “The Morning of the Bride” from season four, a kind of Bluebeard story in which Bel Geddes learns an awful truth about her new husband, then watch “Slaughter.” Follow that up with “The Foghorn” from season three, based on the Gertrude Atherton short story, and close out with “Sybilla” from season six, directed by Ida Lupino.
“Dip in the Pool” – 4 stars
Season Three, Episode Thirty-Five, aired June 1, 1958
Synopsis: Hitch’s second Roald Dahl adaptation. Keenan Wynn (Dr. Strangelove) plays boorish American William Botibol who is on a cruise with his wife to a tightly budgeted European tour. He learns from stock broker Renshaw (Philip Bourneuf) about a shipboard lottery that revolves around the daily distance the ship travels and wagers too much when he believes he has insider information. When he’s poised to lose it all, he resolves to juke the odds by “accidentally” falling off of the ship so that it has to stop and retrieve him. Unfortunately, he makes the wrong choice of eyewitness. Fay Wray has a minor role as Renshaw’s wife. Doreen Lang plays the woman whose nurse disbelieves her about Botibol going overboard; one wishes she had been similarly disbelieved when she falsely identified Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man. (She’s also the hysterical woman in the diner in The Birds.)
Pairing: Pair with Lifeboat for a fully on-the-seas adventure.
“Poison” – 4.5 stars
Season Four, Episode One, aired October 5, 1958
Synopsis: Another Roald Dahl adaptation, this time of a story that served as an allegory about the venomous effect the Raj had on India. The episode opens on James Donald as Harry Pope, a man paralyzed with fear when Timber Woods (Wendell Corey, who played Jimmy Stewart’s cop buddy in Rear Window) arrives to find him in bed, claiming that there is a venomous krait snake asleep on his chest, beneath the sheets. Effectively tense as Woods menaces the helpless, sweaty Pope, who is shot in glorious chiaroscuro, even though the conflict itself is less than satisfactory.
Season Four, Episode Twenty-Nine, aired May 3, 1959
Synopsis: John Williams is a retired detective who has arranged to gaslight a suspect in a murder he could never solve, who happens to be the old AHP archetype of the nephew who killed his rich aunt. On the anniversary of her death, the detective gathers a few friends and makes the nephew believe he is witnessing his aunt’s ghost, but after he confesses, the actress hired to play her arrives, implying the ghost was real. Conceptually fun, but the spectral element drags on in order to reach the minimum run time.
Pairing:Family Plot, which also involves some phoney paranormal phenomena that may be more real than believed.
“Arthur” – 3.5 stars
Season Five, Episode One, aired September 27, 1959
Synopsis: New Zealand poultry farmer Arthur (The Manchurian Candidate himself Laurence Harvey) addresses the audience directly and tells us about how he murdered his ex-fiance (frequent “Poe Cycle” Roger Corman collaborator Hazel Court) when she tried to come back to him after a failed marriage. Slyly funny, especially with Harvey camping it up and breaking the fourth wall. Improves in the second half once the cat-and-mouse games with the police begin.
Pairing: With The Birds, given Hazel Court’s unfortunate fate.
“The Crystal Trench” – 1.5 stars
Season Five, Episode Two, aired October 4, 1959
Synopsis: A story of wasted obsession: Mark Cavendish (James Donald) spends decades waiting for a woman (Patricia Owens, The Fly) whose husband dies on a mountain climbing expedition and who resolves to wait forty years until his body emerges from the ice. When it finally does, Mark discovers a locket around the corpse’s neck, which contains a photo of a different woman. Conceptually interesting and traffics in Hitchcock’s frequent theme of fixations, but the overwrought dialogue about “preserving the roses of summer” paired with a preposterous plot make for a late-in-the-game miss.
Synopsis: Mrs. Bixby (Audrey Meadows, aka “Straight to the moon” Alice from The Honeymooners) gets dumped by the retired colonel with whom she’s been having an affair while claiming to visit her elderly aunt. As a parting gift, he gives her a mink coat that she’ll never be able to explain to her husband; she schemes to pawn the coat temporarily and pretend to find the ticket for it in a cab. Her husband goes to claim it and comes back with a cheap stole, and Mrs. Bixby spots her coat on Dr. Bixby’s secretary.
Pairing: With Marnie, as the scheme Mrs. Bixby concocts reminds one of Marnie’s complex plans to hide the money that she’s stolen.
“The Horseplayer” – 4 stars
Season Six, Episode 22, aired March 14, 1961
Synopsis: Father Amion (Claude Rains)’s church’s roof needs extensive repair. Parishioner Sheridan is on a winning streak at the horse races and attributes his success to his newfound interest in prayer, and shows his appreciation when the collection basket comes around. Amion resists the temptation to follow Sheridan’s lead for a time but finally makes a bet himself, leading to a crisis of faith. Admonished by the bishop, he is told to pray that his horse will not win; the prayer is answered, but in an unlikely way. Cinematically on par with the director’s film work, elevated by Rains’s performance.
Pairing: With I Confess!, which also follows a priest struggling to navigate his spiritual and personal needs.
“Bang! You’re Dead” – 5 stars
Season Seven, Episode Two, aired October 17, 1961
Synopsis: Most like The Wrong Man in that this episode takes the form of an “issue” picture. Billy Mumy’s uncle comes to visit and leaves his revolver laying about carelessly, where the cowboy-obsessed little boy finds it and carries it with him all over town, pointing the gun at passersby who play along with him, completely unaware that they’re staring down the barrel of a real deadly weapon. It’s fantastically tense, with a standout sequence where the boy follows the family’s domestic help Cleo (Juanita Moore of Imitation of Life fame) with the gun in first person perspective. Haunting!
Pairing: With Sabotage, for the real and present danger to a child.
“I Saw the Whole Thing” – 2.5 stars
Season Eight (now The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), Episode Four, aired October 11, 1962
Synopsis: On the day following a hit and run accident, Michael Barnes (John Forsythe, thankfully much less obnoxious here than in The Trouble With Harry) goes to a police station and tells the officer on duty that it was his car that was involved. Five eyewitnesses claim the car never stopped before colliding with a motorcycle, and Barnes fears that if his wife learns about the trial she will miscarry, for the third time. Like most episodes of Hour that I have seen, the plot is a bit belabored; by the end of the scene in which Barnes has broken down the testimony of the first witness called to the stand, you already know that you’re going to have to watch this same thing happen four more times. The twist (that it was Barnes’s wife driving) is fine, and a concise version of this story in half an hour on Presents would likely have been quite good. I may have simply been out of patience by the time we got here, but this is a forgettable hour of television.
Pairing: With Murder!, Hitch’s first film to include elements of the courtroom drama.
At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty (give or take) of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. Because the uptown Prytania in New Orleans programs a great deal of classic Hitchcock, Brandon had already seen and reviewed many of them, but I still needed to watch (or re-watch) all of them in order to complete my “best Hitchcocks” list, which sometimes left me without an outlet to talk much about them, and we didn’t always agree. So, I’ve collected my thoughts on the Hitchcock films already covered by Swampflix below.
When compiling the document for us to keep track of what had and hadn’t already been covered, Suspicion was a film that I noted I hadn’t seen, because once you get into that period of Hitchcock’s work where he had a high density of films beginning with S— (Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Stage Fright), they tend to blur together somewhat. To my surprise, when I went to my notes in the margins of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, I discovered that I had given this one a rating that was quite high, with no date associated. As I watched the film, I slowly began to recall the general outline of the plot, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how a younger, even less patient version of myself was able to get through this film in a single sitting, let alone enjoy it so much. In general, I find Hitchcock’s domestic dramas less interesting than his espionage plots. For every exhilarating Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a plodding I Confess. Suspicion is a film that I felt had a lot in common with Hitchcock’s very early work Number Seventeen, in that it’s repetitive and tiresome for most of its runtime, until it suddenly whips into gear in its final fifteen minutes. No wonder I forgot that I had already seen it; I can now vaguely recall a TCM screening that was so unmemorable that I had long ago assumed that images from it were things that I had dismissed as incorrect recollections of Notorious, most notably the scenes of Cary Grant in a poorly driven car.
Most viewers’ issues with Suspicion stem from what many considered to be a rushed, cop-out ending. Supposedly, the film was intended to end more like the book on which it was based, with Lina (Joan Fontaine)’s suspicions about her husband Johnnie (Grant)’s plans to murder being revealed to be well-founded. Apocryphally, Hitchcock lost a fight with the studio about this ending, as there were concerns that Grant’s performance as a murderous cad would tarnish his marketability as a leading man. I can say with certainty that this is not my issue with the film because the last-minute revelation that Johnnie is innocent in the deaths of his friend Beaky and was only picking the brain of a local Agatha Christie-esque mystery author to find a way to commit suicide is, in my interpretation, an utter fabrication. He was very clearly going to murder Lina, and his sudden apology for his behavior after all of his sinister machinations is yet another in a long line of Johnnie’s fibs that Lina naively falls for. After several rinse-and-repeat scenes of Johnnie being caught in a lie and then having to backtrack out of it, the audience has the understanding that no matter how many times Lina finds one of her family heirlooms at the antique store or someone stops her on the street to “Oh, honey,” her about the fact that her loser husband is not at work as he claims but is instead a frequent fixture at the race track, she’s just going to fall for it again. I don’t understand how the film’s final scene could be read any other way. She’s just getting back on the carousel again, and the next time Johnnie takes her on a dangerously fast coastal drive, he’s going to successfully push her out of the vehicle because she’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. This is not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s almost enough to save it, but not quite. The image of an enshadowed Grant summiting the stairs while carrying a possibly poisoned glass of milk is striking, but it comes far too late in a meandering plot to make much of a difference.
When we talked about The 39 Steps, one of the things that I mentioned was that ingesting so many Hitchcock films in rapid succession highlighted the fact that North by Northwest was assembled from various ideas, images, frameworks, iconography, and archetypes that he had been sharpening and honing for decades at that point in his career. Specifically, I cited that North by Northwest was all but a remake of 39Steps in structure and character, with the Hitch staple of an innocent man on the run featuring a similar romantic entanglement and similar climactic finale taking place in a landmark location (although the director was using the last of these tropes as early as 1929’s Blackmail). As it turns out, there was (at least) one link in the chain of Hitchcock’s evolution of this concept that I hadn’t seen at that time, 1942’s Saboteur. In the midst of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, a domestic terrorist sabotages a California aircraft manufacturing facility, and blame falls on factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who goes looking for the real culprit based on a piece of mail that he saw the saboteur carrying. Just as in The 39 Steps, this results in our reluctant hero falling into the hands of a fascist-supporting man who takes advantage of his status as a well-respected member of the community, being forced to take a hostile woman hostage, escaping from police custody on a bridge, and even being forced into turning himself over to the antagonists when his love interest is threatened just when he has the opportunity to expose their nefarious deeds to a large audience. Presaging his eventual use of Six Grandfathers Mountain in North by Northwest, the film’s nail-biting climax takes place at the top of the Statue of Liberty.
What sets this one apart is both how jingoistic it is about America while remaining frank about and critical of its institutions. As always, Hitchcock’s police officer characters are inept, corrupt, and easily-duped, but the series of characters that Kane meets along the way who aren’t surreptitiously fascists are a broad spectrum of kindly strangers who help him evade detection and stay one step ahead of the police. Blind pianists, bearded ladies, long-haul truckers: they are all united in their belief in Kane’s innocence, and each independently contributes more to the successful capture of the titular saboteur than the combined efforts of the systems in place. The system itself is the enemy of the people, whether embodied in the wealthy—composed of coastal urban socialites and wealthy rural land men alike—or in the passive collaboration of a law enforcement which does the bidding of the wealthy and ignores the innocence of the common man. It’s interesting subtext, and although a lot of critics found the performance of Cummings as Kane underwhelming, I found myself rather taken with him in this film. Not as well remembered as either of the films that it serves as the link between, but an exceptional picture nonetheless.
One of the many unintended tragic consequences of the “improvement” of search engines over time is that the recommendations for related searches can sometimes pop up and spoil something for you before you get the chance to get to what you were trying to find. This film is not often in discussion as a major work in Hitchcock’s canon, despite the fact that it’s quite good, and is instead only remembered as one of the films that featured an element that Hitchcock regretted. I won’t get into what or why (I’m kinder to you that the Google landing page in that way), but I will say that, just as the director was strongarmed into feigning apologizing for the shocking act of violence that is (for many) the most memorable thing about Sabotage, the public “I’m sorry” that Hitchcock made in later years for breaking the audience’s trust by subverting a narrative convention here should never have come to be. It’s an artist’s job to challenge the observer, and although the outcry from the masses in response to one of this film’s twists must have weighed heavily on his mind for many years, Hitchcock didn’t owe us an apology. Even as early as 1950, the audience presumed that they came to a Hitchcock picture with the expectation that they would be shocked, surprised, and entertained, and they got what they paid for. When I hear about the people who whined about Hitchcock “breaking their trust,” they all look like Annie Wilkes in my mind’s eye.
This is an oddity in the Hitchcock film canon for a few reasons. Firstly, a lot of the man’s films are either sprawling odysseys that take a character from London to the Highlands or from Madison Avenue to Six Grandfathers Mountain, while he drew attention to his “limited setting” pictures (namely Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window) by confining their location. Dial M for Murder is often left out of discussions of the latter, largely because it isn’t confined to precisely one location, but it is noteworthy in that it’s limited to no more than three sets and some rear-projected street scenes. Despite this, it doesn’t do any of the fancy camera work that Rear Window did (that same year, no less). Even when a character is facing trial for a murder, instead of the standard courtroom scene, we get a more expressionistic image of said character standing before a colorful void that reflects their inner turmoil while the charges are read and the sentence is pronounced, all in barely a minute of screentime. It further differentiates itself from the larger repertoire in that, when Hitchcock followed a traditional mystery structure, he usually stuck to the age-old whodunit scaffolding. Dial M for Murder is a howcatchem (like Columbo or Poker Face) feature and it was released theatrically (in 3D!), it more neatly intersects with the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The anthology series began airing the year after this film was released and continued for a total of ten seasons (with the last three featuring episodes of an hour in length rather than the thirty minutes they had spanned in previous years, much to the detriment of the renamed Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitch didn’t direct every episode himself, of course (in total, he directed 18 of 361), but the series did have a symbiotic relationship with his film career. The most obvious impact came with Psycho, which Hitchcock shot quickly between seasons of the show and using the show’s crew, which is why it was his first film since Strangers on a Train to be shot in black and white instead of color (other than The Wrong Man, where the monochrome nature is deliberate due to the movie’s docudrama nature). When he did direct episodes of the show, Hitchcock would use the show’s resources to work on proofs of concept for his features, essentially treating the series as an incubator for test runs of certain techniques. The season-two episode “One More Mile to Go” is perhaps the most apparent in this respect, as one can draw a direct visual line from that episode’s use of a dashboard point of view of a traffic stop and the sequence in Psycho where Marion Crane is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. This film also features an appearance from John Williams, who appeared in eight separate Hitchcock Presents narratives (one of which was a three-parter, so he technically was in ten episodes), many of them Hitchcock-directed installments, which goes to show how much the two got along.
This is a lot of information about the technical elements of the movie and where it fits into the oeuvre, which overlooks that, on the whole, this is a delightful little reverse mystery. Ray Milland, the man with the x-ray eyes himself, discovers that his wife (Grace Kelly) has been having an affair with a handsome young tennis star (Robert Cummings) and sets out to have her murdered, but when she manages to kill her would-be-killer in self-defense, he allows her to go to trial for murder, hoping that the justice system will solve all his problems. Small scale and domestic, but still quite good.
Retired catburglar and jewel thief John Robie (Cary Grant), alias “The Cat,” lives a life of quiet leisure in a French villa, having been paroled for his work in the French Resistance during WWII. When a string of high profile jewelry burglaries is reported along the French Riviera, Robie knows that he’ll be questioned, and fears the loss of his reputation as a reformed man. When investigators do come for him, Robie escapes and makes his way to the restaurant of his friend Bertani, whose staff consists almost entirely of the old gang of thieves, all making an attempt at an honest life. Bertani directs the daughter of the restaurant’s wine steward to take Robie by boat and drop him off at a nearby beach club. Unbeknownst to him, it’s here that he’s first noticed by Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), an American traveling with her nouveau riche mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis). Robie also encounters a man named Hughson (John Williams again), an insurance specialist with Lloyd’s of London, who is in the area due to many of the recent thefts having been insured by his employer. Reluctantly, he agrees to help Robie try to find the copycat “Cat” by providing information about another set of insured clients in the area, which just so happens to include Mrs. Stevens and her daughter.
I watched this one shortly after seeing both the striking The Lady Vanishes and the non-Hitchcock noir classic Dark Passage, and it couldn’t help but feel a little lackluster in comparison. Reportedly, Hitchcock decided to direct this picture because he wanted to take a vacation in France, and if that’s true, I’d have to admit that it shows. There are glorious, lovely sweeping vistas throughout, but there’s nothing in the film with the inspiration of, say, the zoom in from across a great chessboard-tiled entry hall to a tiny key in someone’s hand in Notorious. When Hitchcock pulls out one of his trademarks, like a climactic rooftop scene at the end, it feels less like he’s playing the hits and more like he’s spinning his wheels. Kelly is magnetic as always, but Grant fails to inspire.
What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? My most recent rewatch (of many) was at a repertory screening at my local megaplex, accompanied by a younger friend who had no concept of what the movie was beyond obliquely recognizing the title, but he had some sense of what was going to happen because of his familiarity with the AMC prequel series Bates Motel; there’s something about horseshoe theory and pop cultural penetration to be mined from that, I’m sure. Sixty-six years later, the score is still so iconic that it was used in Primetime. It’s Psycho. You already know everything there is to know about it.
The Birds is my mom’s favorite Hitchcock, but I still never managed to see it until I was an adult. It’s hard to describe the film without sounding like you’re talking about a B-grade schlocky horror, because in many ways, it is one, but like Psycho before it, it was also a genre definer. Tippi Hedren is a socialite who has risen to notoriety after a practical joke got out of hand and resulted in a widely publicized court appearance. She has a meet-cute with a handsome lawyer who is trying to buy a couple of lovebirds for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren, believing that she’s in a romcom, buys the birds and tracks him down to Bodega Bay, where she learns that her new love interest has an overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy) who ruins all of her son’s potential relationships. Were it not for the ominous lack of sound (other than cawing corvids) that played over the film’s opening credits, one could mistake this for any other period romantic comedy, right down to Hedren’s character being a comically bad “woman driver” and her getting a mild injury (via divebombing seagull) that her love interest can tenderly tend. Other than a typically an offhand mention of the lawyer’s mother’s chickens refusing to eat, nothing seems truly amiss until the birds turn on mankind in full force, and we’re suddenly in a very different kind of movie.
(Tippi Hedren is iconic in this part. I remember commercial parodies of her taking refuge in a phone booth airing well into early aughts, and we probably only stopped seeing them because those are a thing that don’t exist anymore; and that didn’t stop a bird figurine based on her from selling out just two years ago.)
The Birds is not as shocking a swerve as the mid-film shake-up of Psycho, but the shot of one of the residents of the small town being discovered with his eyes completely pecked out is a major departure from an otherwise charming story so far, and things only get more exciting from there. There’s a scene in the diner in town that feels like it became a direct inspiration for so many similar tableaux in a great many of Stephen King’s works, where the residents of a coastal village argue and turn on one another when faced with some external evil force. All hell breaks loose moments later when a man gassing up his car is attacked by the birds, causing him to spill a trail of gasoline that ignites and sets off chaos. The final twenty minutes feature an all-out attack on the farmhouse by screeching fowl, and it’s terrifying. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.
Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty (although it certainly is all of those things), Frenzy is a film that I can’t help but detest for the shadow that it casts over the rest of Hitchcock’s career. Gone are the subtleties and nuances with regards to sex and violence. Instead of the provocative image of stockings being dried near a fireplace in The 39 Steps or fireworks going off over the water outside of a hotel window when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly kiss in To Catch a Thief, we get a graphic rape sequence. In place of the implication of violence in Psycho, where we never actually see a knife penetrating flesh, but the sequence tricks you into thinking you have, we witness stomach-churning violence. When the ending of North by Northwest was considered too risqué for its implication that Grant and Eva Marie Saint are about to consummate their marriage, Hitchcock cheekily thumbed his nose at the censor board by ending the film on the metaphorically graphic image of a train entering a tunnel. Frenzy shows the director in a different moral era, one in which he can get away with more salacious and explicit images and content, and he goes full bore into it at the end of his career.
Frenzy raises the question of whether or not all of the sly playfulness and clever directorial handiwork in Hitchcock’s oeuvre would have existed if he hadn’t had to outwit and circumnavigate contemporary censorship, ratings boards, and public sentiment. We remember Hitchcock as a master of the discipline because of the subtleties of his work, his deft hand at misleading you via cinematic trickery into thinking you’ve seen something that you didn’t, his impudent impishness at pushing the envelope. Even at the height of his career and amidst nigh-universal acclaim for his work during his golden era, Hitchcock had to be cleverer than the people who could (and would) try to stop his vision, and that made him sharper as a filmmaker. Frenzy’s very existence implies that, with those strictures loosened, an unbridled Hitchcock is craven, schlocky, and base. This is the film that fans the flames of those who argue Hitch was a misogynistic asshole. If there was nothing else left of his body of work but Frenzy, there could be no counterclaim.
How Many Cigarettes? is the dirtbag slacker equivalent of fellow movie-metric website Does the Dog Die?. Instead of measuring movies by their tally of potential trauma-triggers (such as gratuitous canine deaths), How Many Cigarettes? tallies the number of cigarettes smoked onscreen. If its characters rip enough cigs to reach a one-smoke-every-5-minutes runtime ratio, a movie automatically qualifies as “A Real Smoker Movie,” since its audience could conceivably chainsmoke throughout it without ever having to smoke alone. How Many Cigarettes? is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek project, one my friend Leigh started as an ex-smoker who still recognizes the allure of a cinematic cigarette and a life-pausing smoke break. The project is even more thorough than it is silly, though, capturing dozens of screengrabs each from hundreds of movies so people can get a quick glimpse of how many cigarettes are smoked in classics like Jurassic Park (7), GoodFellas (53), Mulholland Drive (7), and Casablanca(124!). As arbitrary as that metric may seem at first, it has forever altered how I watch movies. Once you start looking for cigarettes, it’s hard to stop. I remember sitting next to Leigh at a local screening of Almodóvar’s High Heels and had to ask if the pregnant woman smoking onscreeen counted as two cigarettes, since she was technically smoking for two. He seemed amused by the question, but my guess is that the hardline answer is it only counted as one cig. When you’re collecting raw data for “Real Smoker Movie” metrics, these distinctions really matter.
The How Many Cigarettes? project reached its natural zenith this week when Leigh presented a Gap Tooth screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s dead-eyed 1986 romcom Shadows in Paradise at The Broad. He introduced the film—Kaurismäki’s finest work, from what I’ve seen—as a core title in the Real Smoker Movie canon, citing it as the movie that first inspired him to start counting cigs in the first place. There are 71 cigarettes smoked in Shadows in Paradise, which is impressive for a film only 74 minutes in length. In the hand-illustrated zine he produced to accompany the screening, Leigh writes, “The number of cigarettes smoked here seems like a joke. Almost every scene has between 1 and 9 people smoking cigarettes.” He’s right. Once you start counting, the rate of cigarettes being lit from scene to scene becomes outright comical. Every single conversation is punctuated with the flick of a lighter, pulls on a filter, and the stamping of a cherry. And yet, it’s honestly something I didn’t notice the first time I watched the film back in 2021, alongside the other Kaurismäki classics The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past,and The Other Side of Hope. Growing up in the 80s & 90s, chainsmoking just seemed like a normal, everyday part of adulthood, back when my dad would smoke entire packs of Marlboro Golds indoors, as if he were enjoying a snack or a soda. So, watching the despondent, lovelorn characters of Kaurismäki’s Helsinki chat over a constant procession of smoke breaks just felt natural to the movie’s time & place. Rewatching the movie through the How Many Cigarettes? filter, though, some of the cigarette-specific images do feel intentionally comical, like when Matti Pellonpää appears smoking while wearing sunglasses indoors, hiding his romantic heartbreak behind a costumey idea of vintage rock ‘n’ roll cool. The cigarettes are both artificial movie props and natural urban decor. They are essential to the movie’s mise-en-scène.
Something I did notice about Shadows in Paradise the first time I watched it was all the trash. There are enough standalone shots of wet garbage in the film to inspire a How Many Cigarettes? sister site that measures movies by their literal trashiness, per-pound. Pellonpää stars as a lonely garbage man who slowly, carefully sparks a romance with a jaded grocery store clerk, played by fellow Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen. In genre terms, it’s an awkwardly stilted romcom, delivered in a proto-Wes Anderson flat affect as the blue-collar pair gradually earn equal footing in each other’s esteem one smoke break at a time. From a broader view, it offers stray documentary glimpses into 1980 Finnish waste treatment processes, trailing Pellonpää from dumpster to dumpster as he hauls away endless heaps of trash. His social status as a garbage man directly plays into his dateability too, as his only viable romantic foil is a middle-manager yuppie dipshit who lords over a trendy clothing store. Outinen seems a little embarrassed to be dating a garbage collector, but it’s still instantly obvious that she won’t be able to make it last with the yuppie, because it’s impossible to picture her sharing a cigarette with him behind a grocery store dumpster. Pellonpää knows his way around an ashtray, though, and his social status as a trash-hauling beer guzzler can be adorable in its own way, once you get past the smell. There’s a pitch-black urban despair to Shadows in Paradise that echoes throughout Kaurismäki’s other works, but it’s mostly one of set dressing & social circumstance, as typified by its empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts. It’s ultimately a very sweet love story, though, a romcom that deals exclusively in deadpan whimsy.
If there’s anything direct Kaurismäki was attempting to signal to his audience through all of the onscreen trash & cigarettes, it’s that Shadows in Paradise is meant to be a love story for The People. He even went as far as to group it with The Match Factory Girl & Ariel as his official “Proletariat Trilogy.” It probably means something, for instance, that when Pellonpää & Outinen exit the film via cruise ship for a makeshift honeymoon, the vessel is decorated with the Communist hammer & sickle. Likewise, How Many Cigarettes? is a movie database for The People, decidedly unpretentious in its selections and open for collaboration with its patrons. Leigh has opened the database up for volunteer contributions, which you can find information about on the site’s About page. Even more generously, he has uploaded a printable copy of the “Every Cigarette Smoked in Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows in Paradise” zine, which includes a brush-pen illustration of every cigarette smoked in the movie, along with a leaderboard of some Real Smoker Movie heavy-hitters like The Bikeriders (104), Road House(71), The French Dispatch (86), and Smithereens (37). Print yourself a copy and poke around the website the next time you’re bored on a smoke break or just looking for your next Movie Night selection, to be determined by one absurdly specific metric.
